Editor’s note: Breaking views are thoughts from individual members of the editorial board on today’s headlines.

Putting American incarceration rates into global context, the Prison Policy Initiative has broken down the incarceration rates of each American state in relation to incarceration rates across the world.

Compared to the rest of the world, even the most “progressive” states are revealed to be overly reliant on incarceration.

According to their analysis, Oklahoma is the world leader in incarceration, with 1,079 Oklahomans behind bars per 100,000 people. That’s well above the national average of 698 per 100,000.

California, even after reducing its prison population by tens of thousands of people over the last decade, has an incarceration rate of 581 per 100,000. By comparison, the incarceration rate in the United Kingdom is 139 per 100,000. In Canada it’s 114 per 100,000. And in Iceland it’s just 38 per 100,000.

Opponents of criminal justice reforms in California like to complain about reforms like AB109, Proposition 47 and Proposition 57 (while never really complaining about Prop 36, passed in 2012, which ended our barbaric practice of sentencing people to life imprisonment for low-level crimes via three strikes), because of their misguided belief that caging people for years on end is the key to a safer society.

It’s not – crime rates have at worst been stable or trended downwards since the passage of those reforms. The reality that mass incarceration is unnecessary is evident nationwide as well, as most states experienced simultaneous reductions in incarceration and crime between 2008 and 2016, California included.

It’s an embarrassing state of affairs for a nation that prides itself on being the land of the free to be the world leader in incarceration, and it has everything to do with the flawed idea that warehousing people necessarily makes us safer.

“For four decades, the U.S. has been engaged in a globally unprecedented experiment to make every part of its criminal justice system more expansive and more punitive,” notes the Prison Policy Initiative. “As a result, incarceration has become the nation’s default response to crime, with, for example, 70 percent of convictions resulting in confinement — far more than other developed nations with comparable crime rates.”

It’s time for America to end this flawed experiment.

Among many other things, we need to scale back our reliance on lengthy sentences and sentencing enhancements, we should decriminalize or legalize consensual crimes like drugs and voluntary sex work, invest more in reentry programs and scale back barriers to successful reintegration (especially those on employment), and we should rebalance our criminal justice system to actually focus on achieving justice instead of high conviction rates.

While we’re at it, we should stop keeping people behind bars just because they’re poor, and pass bail reform.

There’s no way anyone can objectively look at our criminal justice system and conclude it makes any rational sense. Instead of wasting over $70,000 per prisoner per year in California, how about putting more resources towards actually rehabilitating people? Or reintegrating them once they’ve served their time? Or preventing crime? Or all three?

As Americans, in what is said to be a prosperous nation predicated on liberty and respect for the individual, I think we can do better than just locking people up. The rest of the planet makes that perfectly obvious.

Sal Rodriguez is an editorial writer and columnist for the Southern California News Group. He may be reached at salrodriguez@scng.com